Highlights—November 29, 2014

The Channel Register (United Kingdom):

IBM lifts axe, will trim UK workforce weeks before Chrimbo. All about 'rebalancing' don't yer know. By Paul Kunert. Excerpts: With only weeks to go before the good folk of Blighty sit down to tuck into their Chrimbo dinners, IBM has decided to swing the corporate axe to trim the local workforce.

According to company insiders, UK boss David Stokes yesterday hosted a phone conference with employees at 1pm to inform them of their fate.

“Stokes got over 60 people on a conference call to tell them they are at risk of redundancy. They have entered into a consultation period,” said a person close to the matter.

The cuts are largely hitting the client execs from the Systems and Technology Group – the folk who spend all their time in front of customers that buy hardware – as well as some people in the channel team, sources told us.

Reader comments follow:

Not just STG. Software Group also has a 30 day employee consultation process beginning on November 26, affecting UK-based client-facing techies and sales staff. IBM are missing the opportunity to be able to make people redundant on Christmas Eve, but there's still potential for some really crap New Years.

It's depressing to see that IBM is still trying to cut its way to growth, and doesn't appear to have learned anything from the failure of Roadmap 2015.

Re: Not just STG. Indeed. The top management needs to be replaced and from outside of IBM. For years now it's been the same story and the chickens have come home to roost.

Anyone working for IBM's career is effectively stagnated and has been for the past 5 years or more. No pay rises, no promotions, no training, not to mention miserable working conditions and no incentive to do anything above clocking in and out (metaphorically speaking).

The thing is, IBM's customers still want to buy hardware and software; just no longer from IBM. IBM is handing them over to the competition to lap up. And the competition is hiring. Anyone with any talent from IBM will find that there are plenty of jobs out there, and will suddenly realise that they can actually earn a decent salary elsewhere. Even some of IBM's partners are hiring: there are still people out there who still believe it's worth buying IBM (and it should be: some of the products are excellent, despite there being no investment in development).

With IBM not even able to put a salesman into the customer, as they've all been sacked, the BPs (or at least those who haven't yet deserted) are picking up the scraps.

As for replacing those at the top: it's probably too late for that. They're determined to destroy the company and replace it with a third-rate cloud provider, who nobody will use because IBM has managed to crap on pretty much every customer it has.

It will take a hell of a lot more than that to restore IBM's reputation.

Most of the people with any talent and ambition left a while ago! They have been losing talented people for about 5 years now and to be honest, the ones that have stayed are the ones that are scared of life outside of Big Blue. Some of those people will be forced into fleeing the mother ship now and will realize that they should have had the guts years ago!

Two weeks ago, there was a online forum along the lines of — what do we need to do at IBM to make it a great place to work. I think I missed the suggestion that said lets make a bunch of folk redundant, so that everyone else stays on and accepts the deteriorating conditions.

LinkedIn:

Why IBM CEO should listen to vox populi. The Corporate Madhouse. By Aleksander Jaskowiak. Excerpts: To make earnings (EPS) rise while revenue is falling, Ms Rometty has cut costs, sold business lines, fired employees, figured out creative accounting methods to lower IBM’s tax rate, bought back shares, and taken on loads of debt (with the latter one can claim that since debt was cheap you could use it to repurchase shares but with the QE policy nearing the end debt servicing costs are likely to go up soon). At the same time, sensing the industry’s “unprecedented change”, she started to steadily move towards cloud computing making it one of IBM’s strategic directions. Although IBM was alert to this shift, it failed to invest in it aggressively and proactively, and cloud-computing business now makes up only about 3 percent of the total revenue. Also, cloud computing has become a very crowded space with numerous and well entrenched competitors of all sizes determined to lower prices to keep their respective market shares on the march towards total commoditization as major players (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) have been ruthlessly slashing cloud prices, making cloud a razor-thin margin business. And historically, IBM is a firm that is quite used to making fat margins; it is not a business that feels comfortable at all in the thin-margin universe. One of the other major reasons IBM will not easily transform to the cost leadership (low price) industry is that it needs to support enormous byzantine administration that has grown immensely over the years – there are layers on layers of management in all conceivable reporting configurations known to the modern organization management theory. ...

But still, why are such immense resources being allocated to stock repurchases (See Exhibit 1: since 2000 to date IBM has paid a staggering $150 BILLION for share repurchases almost twice what was spent on R&D during the same period)? Corporate executives give several motives but none of them has come close to the illuminating power of this simple reality: stock-based instruments and reward mechanisms constitute the majority of corporate executive remuneration, and in the short term (or as we can observe in case of IBM long-term, too) buybacks have this almost supernatural ability to drive up stock prices.

In 2012 42% of the 500 highest-paid executives’ compensation came from stock options and 41% from stock awards (Source: William Lazonick, HBR, September 2014). By increasing the demand for a company’s shares (decreasing their number in the open market), open-market buybacks automatically lift its stock price, even if only temporarily, and can enable the company to hit quarterly earnings per share (EPS) targets (the denominator decreases, sometimes significantly – See Exhibit 1).

In other words it is the executives themselves who repeatedly benefit from price increases generated by repurchases—by selling their personal shares after exercising stock options (generously awarded as part of their compensation packages) at attractive strike prices. And this is exactly what has been happening at IBM – execs continued to sell their shares almost immediately after exercising stock options. For those interested in the topic, Yahoo Finance provides a very comprehensive analysis of exec stock option transactions. Fascinating read! ...

What should happen instead? This is a list (and it is by no means complete) of some major changes that I believe should happen fast if the Firm were to reinvent itself yet again:

Empower employees and stop treating them as “resources” — listen to vox populi; who can better understand the market needs than those who are serving customers in the local markets;

Give more autonomy to country organizations and country-level service heads (GBS/GTS) (pricing, product portfolio, local strategies);

Skim the administrative and bureaucratic machinery and simplify the decision making process;

Encourage cross-business unit collaboration;

Integrate the sales and delivery organizations - the two should understand each others' limitations and capacity (in the failed CIA cloud deal, the agency had serious reservations about the ability of IBM technology to scale in response to usage peaks and assessed the Company’s technical abilities as negligible favoring Amazon who won not on cost but on value proposition quality); ...

Review the cost cutting initiatives – cost is not the only determinant of success and all the cost cutting initiatives to date were triggered mostly by the $20 EPS objective;

Change C-suite and top management incentive systems from the stock options/stock awards based (which can lead to a temptation to manipulate stock price through massive stock repurchase programs) to that grounded in the long-term value creation KPIs;

Dump the “this-is-the-most-important-quarter-in-your-life” lenses through which every business opportunity is viewed and instead start to value opportunities through their long-term value creation potential; consequently, change the mid-level management incentives and KPIs to reflect the long-term view;

Bring in C-suite executives from outside the Firm just as it was done in the 1990s when the Firm went almost bankrupt and was saved by an outsider;

Revise and improve the M&A strategy – currently the Firm, otherwise a shrewd serial acquirer, focuses mostly on pushing the targets' products/services through its global distribution channels and sales force neglecting to nurture their inherent qualities and innovation capabilities; thus the acquisitions’ effects usually do not last long as targets, once acquired (usually with high acquisition premia), stop innovating and bringing new products and start losing the best people.

IBM was a truly great and exceptional firm and it really breaks my heart to watch it slowly (and hopefully not yet inevitably) degrade and lose its cutting-edge competitive advantage. However I do believe that with some effort, determination, focus and open communication the ship can be saved. This ship is full of truly bright and courageous people who are the main asset this great Firm has ever had.

Seeking Alpha:

IBM: Too Much Of A Debt Thing. By Ravi Bala. Excerpts: Even after a disappointing Q3, stagnant growth, and just overall underperformance, IBM still wants to buy back 5 billion dollars' worth of stock. ...

The fact that IBM buys back shares is not a problem in itself. The problem is the approach IBM is using to buy back shares. It is using debt, not cash generated from its underlying business, because the underlying business is not performing well. ...

Repurchasing shares decreases the equity outstanding. Since IBM's shares are not being funded from cash derived from its operations, its debt levels relative to equity levels have been increasing rapidly. That is why the chart below is a bit unsettling. ...

IBM needs to stop repurchasing shares. It is already giving shareholders return in the form of dividends. It does not need to give the shareholders additional incentives to hold onto the company's stock.

IBM needs to focus on the long-term perspective of the company — producing. IBM's focus on the short-term benefit of a high stock price may prove to be harmful going forward. It has to find some way to generate that revenue.

The Vancouver, Washington Columbian:

IBM stuck in the ways of the 1950s. By Malcolm Berko. Excerpts: Dear Mr. Berko: Please tell me what you think about buying 100 shares of IBM. Our dentist (also a friend) has been in the market for over 25 years and strongly recommends the stock. He thinks that the new CEO will turn IBM around and that the price could jump 50 percent by late 2015. — B.E., Durham, N.C.

Dear B.E.: I think your dentist is using too much nitrous oxide. ...

IBM is a sales organization, and revenues from its three core businesses — services, software and hardware — are in a downward spiral. IBM is inflexibly huge, and in today’s environment, size doesn’t protect it from emerging long-term threats when customers change their buying habits. Imagine the time it takes for an aircraft carrier to make a 90-degree turn. IBM is like that aircraft carrier, and cloud computing is shifting the enterprise IT landscape, forcing IBM to make course changes. Because computer resources are increasingly delivered by cloud providers rather than traditional enterprise IT departments, the demand for IBM’s high-end servers and software has slowed to a crawl. Additionally, “software as a service” is gaining traction, forcing the middleware and systems management markets to make significant changes. And IBM’s mainframe market is disappearing as new virtualization technologies enable IT people to deploy and manage workloads via a collection of commodity x86 servers. Finally, customers’ appetite for multimillion-dollar IT systems hasn’t recovered from the Great Recession, and a recovery is not expected for a long time.

Everything about this $90 billion-revenue (down from $107 billion in 2011) company is big. Big is safe — like having an elephant in bed with you — but heaven help you if it sneezes and rolls over. IBM’s stock price is down 50 points since Rometty took over in 2012. Revenues have declined for 10 consecutive quarters, and its historic businesses are fading. Still, IBM’s century-old culture hasn’t changed much. Big Blue is too inflexible to learn new dance steps, too huge to respond creatively to changes in the market, too labyrinthine to recognize the problem and find a repair consensus. IBM has more moving parts than a trainload of Swiss watches. The company looks synchronized on the outside (some managers wear golf shirts on weekends), but on the inside, its multilayer executive team is a blueprint for the Tower of Babel.

“IBM is a company full of dead wood and inept management and executives”

Current Employee — Sales Specialist. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years). Pros: Great place to work a few years ago. Fair 401k and crummy benefits. Cons: Management—desperate people trying to prove their political worthiness to keep their positions. Advice to Senior Management: Retire. You've been at the company way too long and are now a liability.

"As an employee you mean nothing"

Former Employee — Advisory Software Engineer. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 10 years).

Pros: At one time it was a good place to work. They paid me.

Cons: It became a terrible place to work and from what I understand not much has changed.

Had a backstabbing manager who screwed me over after detailing a family situation I was going through.

This company is concerned about one thing — the stock price and will do whatever it takes to inflate it.

Management did nothing but pay lip service and say that you had to understand the business.

Resource actions there should be illegal, but they operate just under the radar of the laws so that they don't get caught.

Was part of a resource action and six months later was contacted by a contracting company about my position under the manager who targeted me in the RA. Only good outcome to that was that his bean counting butt was shown the door.

IBM has sold it's PC, retail and now server groups...what's left?

Advice to Senior Management: Eventually you will be looking for another job. There are enough of us 'formers' out there that will hopefully influence companies to not hire you.

“Easy going with good work life balance”

Current Employee — Data Specialist in Hyderābād (India). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years).

Pros: Good work/life balance and work from home.

Cons: No salary hikes; talent not recognised. I was the top rater for consecutive two years but still had the same salary after three years of my joining with IBM. You will find HR only two times in your entire employment time in IBM: once you join the company, and once you leave it.

“Not enough care for the client”

Current Employee — IT Specialist in Denver, CO. Pros: Stable, decent benefits. Work at home. Cons: No raises or bonuses in recent years. Headcount reductions due to stock price. I don't feel like they have the client's best interest in mind.

“Big Blue and lots of Red Tape!”

Former Employee — Global Marketing in Dallas, TX. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 8 years).

Pros: IBM does allow many people to work from home and this cuts down on the stress of traffic and enhances time with your family. Additionally, your peers are some of the most highly respected professionals in their area and it is easy to learn from them. IBM is a big brand name and that power opens doors into B2B clients and business partners.

Cons: Higher management acts as if there hair is on fire and that you need to put it out! There is actually screaming in some business meetings as we are trying gain a common road. Decisions that are made at one meeting are undone at the next and you never know what decision to follow — makes it hard to "get it right".

“Dehumanizing”

Current Employee — Senior Service Delivery Manager in Washington, DC. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years).

Pros: Some of the people with whom I worked were pros for this organization — some of my peers, the technical line staff, and occasionally an executive who understands the balance of delivering well with ensuring overdelivery is avoided. Executives take the manager's side on most manager-employee disputes.

Cons: They offer very poor compensation vs. the market, and offer no consideration of work-life balance. People at sub-executive levels literally live in fear of "resource actions" that are executed annually to move more resources offshore for a (currently) favorable price model. Repositioning the truth to the customer to reflect internal changes in policy or strategy is commonplace.

Advice to Senior Management: If you choose to work for them in this capacity, expect overwork (80-90 hours/week without a break for months and months on end). IBM promotes and encourages an overarching corporate drive to move all domestic resources offshore for no quality reasons, but to simply offer the customer a cheaper deal.

“Great people, but company needs to invest in future”

Current Employee — Software Engineer. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Flexible work hours; very good peers with deep technical background. Cons: The company does not appear to invest in hiring enough new people in order to show they care about the future. Advice to Senior Management: Get back to basics and rebuild the business: good products, services, and a growing pool of talent. Stop worrying only about earnings per share and the stock price.

“Unexpectedly disappointing experience”

Former Employee — Senior Consultant in Quezon City, National Capital Region (Philippines). I worked at IBM full-time (less than an year).

I transferred to IBM because the company was known for its processes but it turns out the processes are just done on paper and nobody fully understands why it is done. Therefore, most of the time it does not add any value.

Irregular working hours

The Manila Delivery Center was very bureaucratic. Even though it is an international company, management is like a microcosm of the Philippine government. Disappointing, really.

For people thinking of transferring here, keep in mind it is mandatory to go to work on Regular Holidays. Regular Holiday pay mandated by the PH government does not apply, you only earn a Time in Lieu leave.

However, taking leaves like Time in Lieu, Vacation Leaves are discouraged. Most of the these benefits are forfeited to achieve the company's financial goal at the expense of the employee's time.

“Project allocation is really frustrating process”

Current Employee — Applications Developer in Pune (India). I have been working at IBM full-time (less than an year).

Pros: No compulsion to go to office if you are not allocated in a project.

Cons: I have a very bad experience of getting allocated to project in IBM. Despite me telling my work location preferences I was assigned to distant office which was about 2 hours journey from my home. No proper interaction in office. You will feel like resigning in first month itself. Think thrice before joining this organization.

Advice to Senior Management: Should follow proper procedure for new joinee.

“Mediocre”

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. Pros: This place provides work flexibility. Cons: Not a place for innovation. Company lags behind in new technology. Advice to Senior Management: Please train your employees in new technology areas and consider it as an investment. It will pay out big time!

“IBM Brno — Czech Republic”

Current Employee — IT Specialist in Brno (Czech Republic). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than an year.)

Pros:

good start of career

great colleagues

if you will decide to do something else,
you can move to other department

multicultural environment

ability to work on new projects

Cons:

none benefits

none pay rise (what you will deal at beginning at interview you will get forever)

none paid team-buildings

managers do care about themselves not people; they will put you down just to go higher (even they are wrong)

cost center

company doesn't invest into people at all, high fluctuation

total chaos, nobody knows where to find what

their Global Delivery Framework (GDF) doesn't work at all in reality—it is their fatal mistake

Advice to Senior Management: Realize that people makes money for company not useless greedy managers. So invest into them, into relation, education; people will be happy then working for IBM => customers will be then happy and not leaving IBM.

“Associate System Engineer”

Current Employee — Systems Engineer in Chennai (India). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than an year).

Pros: Less Work. Can work from home.

Cons:

Very poor management. Managers are not good mentors here. They are still in 20th century

Pay scale is too low.

Growth is at snail's pace.

Personal space is invaded most of the times.

Productivity too low.

Can't think innovatively and your creativity is at all time low.

Have lots of managers for a single resource.

Stupid financial policies.

No perks/employee benefits of any kind except for the managers.

Workplace politics at the max.

Work Environment — non-conducive for learning

Don't expect hikes, you will never get it.

You can't expect peers to be decent and to behave like a professional.

VERDICT: You be here, for sake of holding your job. If you can work here, you can work anywhere else.

Advice to Senior Management: Are you blind?!

“Met the best people here, but you're just another cog in the wheel”

Former Employee - Staff Software Engineer in San Jose, CA. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 5 years).

Pros: IBM is great for people with families. There is a lot of flexibility in your hours and when/where you work. You'll find some very smart people here, and I do have to say, most of my closest friends are from IBM, because they are just that nice. There's some flexibility in moving around the company and trying different roles.

Cons: Everything here, salary/bonus, promotions are generally just a numbers game, whatever is available in the pool. Employees feel under appreciated. No more real perks like free coffee. Salary is more likely on the low end.

Advice to Senior Management: Everything is just a numbers game now, and that gets passed from upper management all the way down, so I'm not sure how much can actually be done or changed.

“BAO practice”

Current Employee — Anonymous Employee I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 5 years).

Pros: Good domain and technology exposure. Work/life balance is good in most of projects (barring some exceptions). Very rich repository of techno/management training material that can avail at your pace. Very open internal social network for collaboration.

Cons: No clear visibility on personal growth and promotion. IBM has blindly acquired many products and individual brand manager does not know how to handle various IBM brands to resolve client's business problem. This results in fragmented view of IBM in front of client.

Office Culture is highly depended on team you are working with.

Advice to Senior Management: IBM has tendency to acquire new products and companies from outside and then blue wash it. IBM should encourage home grown product and tool innovation.

“Employees are well cared for, but the organizational structure of the company is a disaster.”

Current Employee — Designer in Austin, TX. I have been working at IBM full-time (less than an year).

Pros: Compensation and benefits are solid, lots of vacation, good insurance, and I'm working with an extremely talented team.

Cons: The org structure prevents real work for getting done and there's constant pressure to help the company as it struggles. Despite promises and going above and beyond for my group, I've been blocked from promotion.

Advice to Senior Management: There has to be more buy in from mid level secs for design thinking, or products are going to continue to fail. Give your employees a chance to grow a little in their careers instead of treating them like replaceable cogs.

“It WAS a Great Company”

Current Employee — Maintenance Technician in Essex Junction, VT. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Time off; direct management trust and communication. Cons: Too many benefits removed or eroded in the last 10 years. Advice to Senior Management: Try to stabilize the work environment. Too many changes happening too fast.

“Closing the shop...”

Former Employee — Services Sales Executive. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 8 years). Pros: Trying to understand what are those. Not even the image sells. Cons: Good people left. No one to deliver the business. Company ran by accountants. No vision on management. Advice to Senior Management: People come first.

“Bureaucratic mismanaged no-common sense monster

” Current Employee — BI Analyst in Bratislava (Slovakia). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years).

Pros:

easy to get a job, basically speaking proper english and being communicative and friendly is enough

home office and flexible working hours

fully compensated sick leave

relatively safe employment (won't get fired easily)

Cons:

no direction, only cost cutting and constant reorganization

-only way of growing is moving into middle management and brown nosing

promotions are just as little to keep you in, and doing lots of overtime next year again

Advice to Senior Management: Figure out a way on how to lead technology again — or resign. Watson is totally incapable of delivering anything, and there are other systems that are years ahead (Google, Wolfram Alpha). All the talks are just the typical IBM way of selling inferior, incomplete, buggy systems with clever marketing and then blaming the customers for not delivering their part on the implementation.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist. By Josh Eidelson. Along with temporary deportation relief for millions, President Obama’s executive action will increase the number of U.S. college graduates from abroad who can temporarily be hired by U.S. corporations. That hasn’t satisfied tech companies and trade groups, which contend more green cards or guest worker visas are needed to keep tech industries growing because of a shortage of qualified American workers. But scholars say there’s a problem with that argument: The tech worker shortage doesn’t actually exist.

“There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

The real issue, say Salzman and others, is the industry’s desire for lower-wage, more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. “It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor,” Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011 review by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had “fragmented and restricted” oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. “Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor,” says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.

New on the Alliance@IBM Site

Comment 11/23/14:

Received notice from my contracting company yesterday that for the month of December I'll be "receiving" a 28.5% per hour salary reduction. I'm not an IBM'er, just a subcontractor. -Albert-

Comment 11/23/14:

Does not matter how many are resourced. The problems will persist as the management layer is dysfunctional. It needs to be streamlined. Just walk through Blue Pages and see how many VP's and executives there are. There is so much overlap and redundancy. -Ginny Tookus-

Comment 11/24/14:

-Over55-, I was RA'd in March 2012 at age 57. I took the year of IBM-paid COBRA then paid for six months of COBRA myself. Instead of using FHA funds, my wife and I bought a "bronze" policy through the ACA exchange ("ObamaCare"). With only my pension check as income, we received a substantial assist with the monthly premium. That's the good news.

The bad news is that with the exception of preventative care, the first $12,000 of medical expenses this year (and $14,000 next year) is completely out of pocket. It's really just catastrophic insurance; but, I'm grateful...before the ACA we couldn't have gotten private insurance, and the private insurance then available would still allow for us to be bankrupted in the case of a major expense like cancer. My strategy is to hope that the FHA funds stay in place, and then use them for Medicare supplemental insurance. -RA'd and Retired in 2012-

Comment 11/25/14:

To -Big Bob- I know for a fact that there are first and second line and directors who worked for different divisions in IBM that have had no college degrees and some of them have no college courses at all. I could name who they are but I won't. IBM management is made up of the good old boy network and politics. That is the trouble with IBM management. No respect for the employees and constantly wanting to give the employees the shaft. IBM management is in desperate need of a union. -Big Don-

Comment 11/26/14:

As a portfolio in GTS, I see that a major restructuring is coming to Brazil in 1st quarter. Do you know what GTS new director plans for Brazil? The morale here is too slow. It seems that IBM is inducing employees to ask for the pink slip in order to avoid more severances. The new H.R. tool has an option for the employee to request on how to ask to go and leave company. I never seen that in my whole life working with so many USA companies? Someone from Brazil to share some light here? -sabrinaty-

Comment 11/26/14:

IBM GTS UK (formerly ITS) have announced a consultation period today. -AngryMan-

Comment 11/27/14:

As far as first line managers and lack of education go. Many...many are in a technical management position without a lick of technical background and little other education either. The issue is with me (I'm in a tech position) is my manager just doesn't "get" the issues we have to deal with. She's so into charts and graphs, that's all that counts...not how to manage our workload in an intelligent way. -Vermonter-

Comment 11/28/14:

No matter how many shrines IBM builds in NYC to promote the Watson Platform, or delve into CAMSS, it is bound to fail. One thing I noticed about business is that there are basic fundamental things that have to be in place for business to succeed long term such as respect for the employee and honourable management. IBM management is juvenile in thinking Cloud and Watson will save them without fixing fundamental, cultural and organizational problems. Thinking about the intangibles and fixing them takes intelligence and hurts the brain. It is easier to put together a fancy website.

Also Cloud is a race to the bottom. Watson technology will be made redundant by other entrants that will come forth and dominate. IBM will not be able to compete with them. Like the city of New Orleans, it has serious, fundamental problems that need to be taken care of but ignored such as corruption and injustice. This is my opinion only. -foo-

If you hire good people and treat them well, they will try to do a good job.
They will stimulate one another by their vigor and example.
They will set a fast pace for themselves.
Then if they are well led and occasionally inspired, if they understand what the company is trying to do and know they will
share in its sucess, they will contribute in a major way.
The customer will get the superior service he is looking for. The result is profit to customers, employees, and to stcckholders.
—Thomas J. Watson, Jr., from A
Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM.

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